stevegrant

Those figures are slightly flawed, given that the majority of match-going people don't buy a programme, don't buy a cup of tea and probably don't buy a pie.

Didn't Sharp turn us down because he didn't want to move south?

Yes, damn him for not letting people nick content from his website to pass off as their own

Do they not own Spyker Cars, which owns Saab?

You might find some megatrain deals if you're quick. South West Trains don't do advance tickets, so if there are no megatrain options, your best bet will be a Group Saver, assuming you can get 4 people to travel together. Alternatively, Southern DO do advance tickets, and their website is offering 25% off at the moment on top of the cheaper advance fares, so you might be able to get a decent advance fare going round via Chichester, Gatwick and Croydon into London Victoria.

Some would argue they've let the club get away with everything to date, so why should that stop now? Things do seem to be a bit more above-board with this new lot (although clearly that's not saying much), but the Saab situation would concern me. With what is presumably their largest asset struggling for its day-to-day cashflow, it doesn't take much imagination to envisage a situation where they're moving money between each of their interests to prop them up on a short-term basis until they either get lucky and a load of cash comes in (Saab gets a big order, for example, or Pompey get promoted) or they realise they can't juggle it all around anymore and something eventually has to give. I still don't see what they aim to achieve, business-wise, at Pompey. It seems to be a gamble on promotion this season (although without a Leicester-esque mental spending spree), which would then allow them to sell up in a year's time at a sizeable profit, but what beyond that assuming you don't go up? They're clearly not stupid men (perhaps unlike one or more who came before them), so why would they leave themselves open to such exposure and risk?

I do wonder whether there is legal recourse back to Portpin from the charities and small creditors, given that Portpin agreed in writing to reimburse all of them in full. As far as the CVA is concerned, I think technically these debts fall on Portpin's shoulders now (the CVA proposal states that , not PFC 2010 Ltd.

While most of your points there are valid, are you not somewhat concerned that various people seem to keep moving the goalposts in terms of when the creditors will start to receive some of the money they're owed? In the original CVA proposal that was agreed by creditors (and I fully accept that they have since agreed to a rescheduling), the first payment of £2m should have been made in September last year, with a further £3m payable in January 2011, so on that basis, you're £5m behind, a position which will have to be recovered at some point over the next 4 years - no mean feat, I'm sure you'll agree, given the relatively small number of revenue streams the club has. A third of the CVA could have been paid off already, which would have left the club in a much healthier position long-term. I would argue that Chainrai had no intention of paying any of the CVA knowing that the schedule could be amended, and it'll be interesting to see whether the Russians have similar intentions. At least they don't seem to have been spouting their gob off since they arrived about how they were going to turn Pompey into Champions League winners within 5 years or other similar nonsense that previous owners have come out with.

Bear in mind the refunds for the Test match aren't actually handled by Hampshire. The address you had to post the tickets to was somewhere in the midlands.

His scoring record's good, but has to be put into context. It's in the SPL. Many players have scored plenty of goals up there and then failed to do anything of any note when they've moved south of the border. Take the likes of Scott McDonald and Kris Boyd as prime examples, both scored goals for fun for Celtic and Rangers respectively, but couldn't buy a goal last season for Middlesbrough (or Forest, while on loan, in Boyd's case).

The two previous away games down there didn't...

The "cloud" concept looks and sounds nice but I'm yet to find a solution that is both cost-effective and doesn't involve downtime when you need to switch between different hardware configurations. One that I looked at last year told me that an upgrade to additional server nodes would be almost instantaneous, but that a downgrade back to the normal level could result in downtime of up to an hour. That's a situation I'm not prepared to accept. We will be trying out a new enterprise-level server, which will be identical to the servers I use here at work. These servers support a number of high-traffic sites (much more so than SaintsWeb), and will have the company's sysadmin managing the hardware for us, so my relatively modest server admin knowledge won't be needed. It's requiring a fair bit of investment, but it stacks up financially as long as the current levels of membership and advertising revenue are maintained.

West Ham had huge debts when the porno dwarves bought the club and they continue to have huge debts (probably bigger) now. However, they will get away with it if they go straight back up. Don't forget, they've got a £500m stadium built by the taxpayer which they are being gifted for £40m, and will also get to keep the proceeds of the sale of Upton Park.

West Brom side: Myhill, Jones, Mattock, Thorne, Dawson, Ibanez, Fortune, Dorrans, Cox, Miller, Cech. Subs: Kiely, Downing, Roofe, Gayle, Mantom, Wood Pretty strong. Interesting that Dawson's getting a second game in two days, as he played at Rochdale last night as well.

The one time I saw us at Barnsley (2-2 draw, Rasiak scored both), there were no advance sales, only cash on the turnstiles. Hopefully won't be the same again, particularly looking in advance for in-demand away games.

First thing I spotted as well Also, they appear to have 4 teams going down...

Brighton... what could possibly go wrong?

Is there a link to that anywhere?

I had a great deal of sympathy with Aviva over the whole situation, they'd been very good to the club during the dark days but ended up the biggest losers in pure monetary terms because of a personal grudge held by a bloke at Barclays.

Got mine on Friday, only had 9-23. Waiting for the replacement to be posted before sending back/destroying the old one, I'm not going to risk not having any sort of season ticket for the Leeds game...

Indeed. £1m in cash plus the removal of £500k from the annual wage bill was a no-brainer at the time, especially for someone who had already picked up a knee injury that would keep him out for the first 3 months of his spell at Stoke.

I see Nottinghamshire are already 8 wickets down against Lancashire at Southport. I wonder if the pitch inspectors will be called for that one...

Correct.

Nothing along those lines planned at this stage.